From the essay shelf
Living Quietly
I am fifty-three. I keep the books for a company that makes garden tools. I have been married for twenty-four years, I have a grown daughter, and on Thursdays I sing in a choir. I am also, and have been since before I could spell it, a gray heron. I mention the choir first because it takes up more of my week.
Most of what is written about therianthropy is written by the young, for the young, in the first heat of discovery. That is as it should be. But I think it may be useful for someone to say what the thing is like thirty years on, when the heat has gone out of it and what is left is simply one's life.
It settles
When I was twenty the heron was an event. She arrived; I noticed; I wrote pages about it. I had shifts I could have set a watch by. I thought about what I was for hours every day, and it seemed to me the most important fact in the world.
At fifty-three she is not an event. She is the way I stand in line, with my weight on one leg. She is my patience, which my colleagues take for a professional virtue. She is why I go down to the canal before work and stand for ten minutes saying nothing. I do not have shifts any longer, or I have one continuous shift, whichever you prefer. The community has a word for this, integration, and when I was young I thought it sounded like a loss. It is not a loss. It is like the difference between being in love and being married. Less weather; more climate.
On telling
People ask whom I have told. The answer is: three. My husband, in the second year of our marriage, on a walk, when I could not think of a way to make it sound sensible and so simply said it. He was quiet for a hundred yards and then said, "That explains the standing." He has never mocked it and never made much of it, which is exactly right. My daughter, when she was sixteen and asked me straight out why I had a small Greek pendant I never took off. And one old friend from the forum days, whom I have met in person twice.
No one at work knows. My mother never knew. I do not regard this as hiding. I do not tell the people at work about my prayers or my marriage either. An inner life is not a secret merely because it is not announced. I think the young are sometimes made to feel that an identity not publicly declared is an identity denied. It is not so. You may be entirely yourself and entirely private. The heron does not need witnesses.
I will say this: tell someone, if you can. Not everyone. One steady person. It is a great easing to be known by a single other creature, and you would be surprised how often the answer is some version of "that explains the standing."
On being ordinary
Nothing in my outward life would tell you what I am. I wear what a bookkeeper wears. I have never owned a tail and I should feel foolish in one, though I am glad that those who love them have them. My expression of the thing is so small it is nearly invisible: the pendant, the canal, a habit of drawing long-legged birds in the margins during meetings.
And that is enough. I want to say this firmly to anyone who feels they are doing it wrong because their life does not look like the videos. You do not have to look like anything. You do not have to do anything. Being it is the whole of it.
What has been hard
I will not pretend there has been no cost. There were years of feeling like a foreigner at every party. There is a grief, on certain evenings in autumn when the birds go over, that I have never found a place to put. It is not unbearable. I have learned to let it pass through, as weather passes, and to be very kind to myself the next day.
If it were heavier than that, I would have gone to someone, and I say so because people of my generation often did not. There is no merit in bearing alone what could be shared. The page on wellbeing is sensible about this.
What has been good
Almost everything else. I have a quality of attention that I would not exchange. I can be alone without being lonely. I know one thing about myself with complete certainty, which is more than many people ever do. And every morning, whatever else is going on, there is water, and I may go and stand beside it.
That is what it comes to, in the end. Not a drama. A life, with a particular slant of light across it. I hope yours is as kind to you as mine has been.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.